- You have to be very flexible.
You have a lot of mobility in WWE.
I mean, when girls are running at you
and you're doing a leap frog to get away from from them.
They run between my legs,
I have to be able to get my legs up really high.
A lot of that came from me
when I did gymnastics and tumbling.
Every sport that I've done has contributed
to my success here in WWE.
Hi, my name is Bianca Belair, and I am a WWE superstar.
I'm gonna take you through all my wellness practices
to help me be the B-E-S-T in the ring.
I train around five to six days a week.
I'm on the road for about 300 days a year.
I do about three to four shows a week.
There's 52 weeks in a year.
So that is 208, is that right?
Is that right?
208 shows a year. [laughs]
My finisher is called the KOD,
which stands for the Kiss of Death.
I put the girl up on my shoulders,
and I flip her over, and she kisses the mats.
So I came up with that finisher when I first started in WWE.
I wear kiss prints on my gear.
It's called the Kiss of Death
'cause once I hit that finisher, she ain't getting up.
It's one, two, three.
That's how I won this.
I am a Royal Rumble winner.
And one of the first black females
to Main Event WrestleMania.
And I walked out as SmackDown women's champion.
I won WrestleMania 38.
And became Raw women's champion.
So I've done a lot, but I'm just scratching the surface.
I am not a morning person.
I hit the snooze button a lot.
I travel so much that sometimes I wake up
and I have no idea where I'm at.
It actually just happened to me.
I woke up, I didn't know what time it was, what day it was,
where I was at, and I was actually at home in my own bed.
It's been a long week in Mexico.
Raw, Saudi Arabia, Crown Jewel.
I'm just the last woman standing.
Honestly, the only thing I can do
is just wake up and take time.
'Cause I'm in a different city almost four days a week.
I get a morning workout in.
That's crucial because otherwise
I just feel lethargic throughout the day.
Breakfast is so important.
I usually have oatmeal with almond butter and blueberries.
I have a protein shake.
And then I have a whole egg,
and mix some egg whites in there.
So my journey into WWE is little unique from everyone else.
So I ran track all throughout college
at the University of South Carolina,
Texas A&M, and Tennessee.
After college, I really missed that competitive atmosphere.
So I found CrossFit.
And it was the first time
that I actually embraced my muscles in my body,
and I actually started having fun.
And someone's attention that I grabbed was Mark Henry,
who is a WWE Hall of Famer.
He was like, listen, I see a WWE superstar in you.
It took me two tryouts.
I got hired in 2016.
And never imagined myself being a WWE superstar.
But now that I am,
I can't imagine myself being anything
other than what I'm doing now.
So I've completely fallen in love.
I used to have a very unhealthy relationship with food.
When I was in high school, I ran track, I was very muscular.
The one thing people would tell me
would help me run faster is if you drop weight.
So I just took it to a whole nother level.
I ended up struggling with bulimia.
Athletic scholarship, and going to college,
and if I got injured, and I decided, okay,
I don't wanna do this anymore.
I wanna try to stop struggling with bulimia.
And I ended up then developing BED,
binge eating disorder, where I was just binge eating.
Fast forward to I got into CrossFit,
and for the first time I saw these women
that had these big beautiful muscles.
They were doing amazing things with their bodies.
And I was finally in this environment
where how my body was naturally made,
it was for a good thing.
I developed a healthier relationship with food now.
And I know that food is fuel to my body,
and it helps me be healthy,
and it helps me do the amazing things
that I do in the ring now.
When I talk about diet, it's not just about food,
it's about what you allow into your brain.
It's about what you allow into your environment.
What type of people that you're around.
What type of vibes you allow around you.
That all has to do with protecting your peace.
When I first got into wrestling,
training was an eye-opener for me.
It was a type of training I had never done before.
You're in the ring, learning how to hit the ground,
bouncing off of the ropes, which you don't realize,
those ropes hurt.
I was black and blue,
bruised on my back from the bottom to the top.
You're also doing weight training as well.
So power lifting.
I focus a lot on my upper body because I power
clean and press girls for a living over my head.
So I have to have big strong shoulders.
I work a lot on hamstrings
and my glutes because you need a lot of power.
I do a lot of knee strengthening and preventative exercises
because you don't want your ACL, or MCL, or PCL to go out.
One of the most important things in the ring is cardio.
When you can run the treadmill for 30 minutes,
elliptical for 30 minutes is not gonna
prepare you for in ring cardio.
Sometimes it just takes you having wrestling matches in reps
to get the cardio because when you're in there,
the bell rings, you're going all the way to the finish,
you have to have the cardio to keep up.
It's a lot of adjusting on the road,
finding what you have in front of you
and making the best of it.
If you go to a gym
they might not have the right equipment that you need.
It's all about consistency.
Just going in there, and moving, and effort.
There's no perfect way of preparing.
I do moderations for a lot of different things,
and sometimes it's not just because
there's not equipment available.
Sometimes it's because a certain body part's hurting
and I know I need to rest that body part.
So I have a moderation
of a different exercise that I can do.
You have to be very flexible.
You have a lot of mobility in WWE.
I mean, when girls are running at you,
and you're you're doing a leap frog
to get away from from them.
They run between my legs,
I have to be able to get my legs up really high.
A lot of that came from me
when I did gymnastics and tumbling.
Every sport that I've done
has contributed to my success here in WWE.
I'm able to flip from doing gymnastics
and tumbling, I have the cardio from track,
I have the strength from CrossFit and power lifting.
You have to have body control
and agility to be able to run at maximum speed,
and bounce off of the ropes,
and hit somebody with a shoulder tackle.
You need that strength to take 'em down.
So it's a combination of a lot of different things.
And it's nonstop the whole entire match.
WWE is an art, it's a skill.
You're competing, but you're also performing
to a live audience.
You're also performing to a camera
where there's millions of people watching you.
You're out there doing amazing feats of strengths,
and you're flipping.
But there's also an art to it.
You make people feel something,
you make people laugh, you make people cry.
You can make people angry, you can make people excited.
And that's the part that really drew me in.
And also to learn the history of the business.
I mean, just seeing how far the women's division has come,
and seeing all the women that came before me,
and laid that foundation.
And then the amazing things that women are doing now.
It's just amazing.
So the show starts at 8:00,
but we're at the arena at 2:00 PM,
sometimes earlier, sometimes noon.
We get to the venue,
we're doing hair, makeup, we're filming rehearsals.
We're trying to memorize everything.
We're trying to go through our matches.
It's basically organized chaos
from 2:00 PM until showtime.
The first thing I do is I go out to the ring.
I like to look at all the seats
and visualize the audience being there.
I like to go through my entrance and rehearse my entrance.
I like to rehearse anything that I'm doing that night.
Everything's live TV,
so we definitely have to do rehearsals.
We do not have teleprompters.
So anything that we're saying on TV
we're memorizing that up in our heads.
We're also rehearsing with other people.
Safety is the number one thing.
So you can rehearse all you want,
but it's live TV, you have to figure it out,
sometimes on the spot.
Things change right before you go out sometimes.
Okay, it's okay to be nervous, just don't be scared.
That's the rule.
For me, on match day, I get very antsy.
I get nervous,
but I've learned to embrace that nervousness.
I can't sit still, so I don't like to get my makeup done.
I like to do my own makeup.
I have to do something with my fingers.
So I do my own makeup, I do my own hair.
Sometimes I'm actually sewing gear in the locker room.
Not necessarily because I need to,
but because I just need to do something with my hands.
It calms me.
It's like meditation for me.
I truly, truly live by the motto,
when you look good, you feel good, you perform good.
So when I look in the mirror and I see my makeup,
my glitter lipstick, and my hair, my rhinestones,
and my jewels, and I'm sparkling.
I look like a star, I feel like a star,
I'm gonna perform like a star.
I have the famous glitter lipstick
that I wear that never comes off.
But sometimes, not sometimes, mostly all the time
I always lose at least one eyelash.
And it's always this right eyelash.
Listen, I'm the Raw women's champion,
and I defeat everyone, but the eyelash is undefeated.
One always comes off, no matter what.
So it's gonna be me versus the eyelash
at WrestleMania 39 this year.
When I first got into WWE, I was trying to figure out
what I wanted to portray to people,
what I wanted people to see and feel when they saw me.
So I came up with Bianca Belair.
And I felt like I was someone who didn't fit into a box.
And I didn't wanna just pick
and choose one part of me to portray.
So I came up with the EST.
Bianca Belair is the EST of WWE,
which means she is the strongest, the fastest, the roughest,
the toughest, the quickest, the greatest, the best.
Anything good that ends in EST, Bianca Belair is,
and she's always striving to be
the absolute best version of herself.
She's very spunky and happy.
Just always trying to have a good time.
She never wants to dim her light for anybody, ever.
And she wants her light to shine to other people.
I was a very shy and quiet kid.
I was very self-conscious.
I was a very athletic child.
And I would sometimes put the pressure on myself
to make myself smaller so that
I didn't wanna make other people feel small.
And sometimes if I did try to show my talents
people would call me a show off, or say I'm cocky.
And so I would practice and work out in the dark.
When I was getting recruited, I didn't tell anyone,
'cause I didn't wanna seem like I was bragging.
Bianca Belair is who I wanted to be as a little girl.
I wanted to be loud, and bold,
and unapologetically me, and proud of that.
And not afraid to tell someone that or show that.
And now, outside of the wrestling ring,
I have that confidence.
I always eat pizza the night before my big matches.
I know a lot of people are probably like,
what, you supposed to do that after.
For me, I feel like I've put all the work in,
the weeks leading up, the months leading up.
Whatever I do the night before
is not gonna erase all that work.
I have all the confidence in my work.
Me eating pizza the night before,
it eases my nerves, and it makes me feel good.
And sometimes I put pineapples on my pepperoni pizza.
Sorry. [laughs]
What does it mean for me to be a woman in wrestling?
Representation for women across the world.
Also with me being the EST WWE,
I wanna encourage everyone to be
the absolute best version of themselves.
So whether that's you stepping in
the wrestling ring as well,
and being the best version of yourself.
Or that's you applying for that job interview.
Continue to have firsts, to make history,
but also get to a point where
we're not celebrating firsts anymore.
It's just now the norm
for women to go out there and show up and show out.
Sometimes people meet me and I tell them
that I'm a wrestler, and they're like, really?
You don't look like a wrestler.
And I'm not sure what that means.
I just wanna get to the point where being a woman wrestler,
we get to define what it means to be a woman
in whatever way that we want to define that.
And I think that if you look at our roster right now
there's so many women that represent so much diversity.
Any woman can look at WWE
and see someone that they relate to.
I'm someone who goes sometimes overboard,
so I have to understand the importance of rest.
When I was doing CrossFit
I was training for the CrossFit Games,
and I was obsessed with being the best.
And I was training two, three times a day.
And I wasn't resting.
My ribs and my back started shifting,
and popping out, and I was getting this pain in my back.
Instead of resting, I figured maybe I'll just
do some more dips and some more pull-ups.
Maybe it'll just pop it back in place.
No, that same rib in the front, the muscles popped
from the ribs, and the rib in the front popped out.
And so I had intercostal costochondritis.
It's one of the most painful things ever.
There's no treatment, there's no surgery,
you just kind of have to sit out and rest.
That time really affected me mentally
in a really rough way and I didn't know how to move forward.
So I was just kind of just stagnant at that moment.
And when I was in that rut of just being stagnant
that's when WWE found me,
and everything turned completely around.
I still deal with the issues of my ribs, even now.
I'll feel the rib come out in the back.
But now I'm the smartest, now the EST, I'm the smartest,
so I know not to keep working out on it.
Recovery is very essential to what we do.
And also too sometimes is really about just resting.
Sometimes I just lay in a bed
and I watch Netflix, and Hulu,
and just all my shows, just to rest my body and my mind.
It's a lot more mental than a lot of people think.
It's mentally exhausting as far as learning a new skill set,
memorizing what we have to do and say on live TV.
It's also mentally exhausting with travel.
Trying to figure out where you are
and where you're going.
It's mentally exhausting too as far as
it's still competition, we're competing.
And we wanna win, and we wanna be the best.
And sometimes we come up short.
It's rough because you have to figure out
who you are as a person, know who you are,
and be strong in that.
I would say sewing really eases my mental health.
I sew all the time.
I sew and make all of my wrestling gear.
And when I'm home, when I'm feeling nervous
or anxious about an upcoming match, I like to sew.
Puts me at ease, makes me feel accomplished.
I mean, I'm like, I'm in the ring,
sitting across my opponent.
I'm like, I made my gear, what did you do?
I learned how to sew through trial and error,
and watching a lot of YouTube.
Making wrestling gear is tricky.
You can't just make an outfit,
and go out there, and have a wrestling match,
because the whole thing will fall apart.
The fabric has to be stretchy,
it has to be durable, it has to be functional.
It's not just fashionable.
I've had a couple of times when I've been scared
I've had to like sew my gear on me and we're taping it.
I'm taping it on my body.
And sometimes I'll put it on,
I'll do a couple jumping jacks and some squats.
I'm like, all right, I think it's good.
Let's pray it holds up.
So let's, is this wood?
Can we knock on this wood?
That's not wood.
We're gonna pretend that's wood.
So, let's pray we never have a wardrobe malfunction.
The best feeling in the world is once the match is over
and you can finally go, [exhales] we did it.
You can finally exhale and you can be proud of what you did.
And the first thing I do is I go directly to my husband
because he's always there backstage watching,
get a little hug and a kiss from him.
I always ask him, did I do good?
Was it good? [laughs]
And he always tells me the truth.
Winding down is very hard after you have a wrestling match.
You're still running off of your adrenaline.
I like to wind down with my family.
That's the one thing that I always have
my family at the shows with me.
I go back to the hotel, have a nice meal together.
And I don't watch my match, right after the show.
I give myself time to enjoy the moment
because I am my biggest critic.
I think that I've become a smarter athlete.
I understand the importance of rest.
I understand the importance of listening to my body.
I think my mental toughness
is so much more stronger now compared to
what it was when I was an athlete in college.
I know how to let my losses motivate me.
I know that an L stands for lesson
more than it stands for a loss now.
I understand it's bigger than me now.
Whether it's representation, or inspiring others.
I'm in WWE at an amazing time where it's given me
this platform to just inspire everyone.
I mean, it transcends across all religions,
races, genders, ethnicities, it doesn't matter.
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